ART REVIEW : Timeless Treasures : With a Sobering Clarity, Getty Photos at the Hammer Reveal Humanity’s Facets

A great painting renews itself over the decades so that it appears timeless. A great photograph profits from the passage of time, fixing a singular moment in the ephemeral flux. It speaks eloquently of the difference between that which is fleeting, such as ourselves, and that which endures, such as nature.

Exhibitions rank among things that are fleeting. It takes a very special one to capture photography’s deeper resonances. Now there’s one to be seen. “Arrows of Time: Photographs From the J. Paul Getty Museum,” on view at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center is special on a number of counts.

It’s the first general survey of the history of photography culled from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s 65,000-work holding. The 175 images selected by curator Weston Naef appear as its creme de la creme. They do more than trace the chronology of a technological art form that is only about 150 years old. Arranged with a kind of sober clarity the pictures interact to create a psychic epic about humankind in the modern era.

The talismanic image here is by Lewis W. Hine, whose turn-of-the-century pictures of kids oppressed by forced work helped bring about the American child labor laws. “Self-Portrait With Newsboy” of 1908 is like a snapshot. It shows a downtown street with strollers out in summer finery, oblivious to a paper vendor so young that his wares dwarf him. Hine’s self-portrait is nothing but his own shadow cast on the pavement.

It’s a picture of an optimistic world going about its business beset, as ever, by injustice. The man behind the camera who wants to heal one of them doesn’t know whether he’s an artist or a social worker but he does know he’s insubstantial--a shadow taking a picture of a shadow. From the beginning, photographic pioneers like Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot knew they had a marvel on their hands, but they didn’t quite know whether it was a sideshow novelty or the greatest tool of visual communication since the invention of painting. In time it proved both and more.

But it never had the aura of making things that would last down the ages. It was a flimsy means of recording a world predicated on constant change. No wonder it’s so poignant.

Early works are already so delicate they have to be displayed under velvet curtains that viewers may lift for a moment. “Arrangement of Specimens” by Hippolyte Bayard is a direct paper print of things like leaves and feathers that look as if they had imprinted on a page where they were pressed.

Many early images are so staged and so intent on imitating the Salon art of the day we learn little from them other than a confirmation that men have always fantasized about exotic women in harems. Then comes a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe taken by an anonymous American in 1849. For the first time a picture looks really alive. Poe appears desiccated and haunted. The camera is established as a magnificent tool for capturing character. It has soul.

But that soul is always based on an awareness of the passage of time. Gustave Le Gray’s “The Broken Wave” shows a shoreline scene that may still look the same today but would not be perceived so because now is not then.

Perhaps the subject most suited to the photographic medium is the young girl captured in her brief moment of utter perfection. Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of actress Ellen Terry at 16 finds her looking as if she has just realized she’ll never be quite this exquisite again.

The camera’s objectivity makes it a natural witness to human folly. In 1857, a group of bureaucrats in top hats postured pompously for Robert Howlett and a future that would not recognize them. On July 5, 1863, Timothy O’Sullivan memorialized a couple of dozen of the 43,000 soldiers who slaughtered one another at Gettysburg. In 1870, William Henry Jackson noted that Old Faithful still spouted on schedule. In 1872, James Wallace Black recorded a panorama of Boston decimated by a great fire. But by 1888, Louis-Emile Durandelle was documenting the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

For most of the 20th Century, photography, like all art, seems preoccupied with analyzing itself, trying to discover its true identity and purpose. Edward Weston, working in L.A., decided the camera was to note exquisite harmonics in the forms of nudes, sea shells and peppers. Man Ray entered the surreal consciousness causing a beautiful model to cry glass tears. Walker Evans, like Hine, persisted in using his lens as a tool of social reform.

As it winds down, photography seems to conclude it can do all of the above, it can choose its own identity and so can its subjects. If an onlooker wants to fall asleep at the coronation of George V that’s fine with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lisette Model positively applauds a pair of drag queens appearing at Hubert’s Freak Museum and Flea Circus. August Sander is mesmerized by a woman who’s achieved perfect androgyny.

The real leitmotif of the photographic quest is individualism. The camera’s built-in knack for the poignant reminds us it’s an attitude now severely endangered.

Los Angeles has never seen a better classic-photography survey than this, which has the work of Diane Arbus, for example, among its most contemporary images.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. (310) 443-7000. Through April 2. Closed Mondays.